Mattress Forum

Yep. It's called Planned Obsolescence.

We are actually having the same basic trouble in our store. Which is that we have this enormous gap to fill between say $1500 in a queen and $2500.  All of the truly really good quality queen sets are starting at atleast $2500 in a queen (this is in Canada of course) and that nothing in between $1500 and $2500 makes hardly any sense at all.  I think I may have mentioned this before but there is one bed we carry that we had a local manufacturer build especially for us (after Sealy and Simmons told us they wouldn't).  And its just a simple high quality pocket coil (made in Texas) with a 3" layer of blended talalay on top of it, then a one inch layer of quilted PU foam on top.  This thing we retail @ $1399.  So yeah I would say its absolutely possible to get a "good" mattress without going so high in price.  But we have to re-evaluate to ourselves what do we really want?  I am in the process of getting them to replace the PU foam layer with quilted latex for a reasonable cost....it might raise the cost a few hundred dollars.  Could be worth it to some...but then I am over $1500 in a queen and over $2000 in a king to make any respectable profit on the thing.  All this being said for us we are typically about as high end as you can go without going to something like a Hastens or a Vi-Spring, so I am not terribly reliant on this particular price range.  I would imagine that if most main stream type of retailers really wanted to make a bed like this for the best possible price they could buy it for significantly less, but yes that remains to be seen in our industry.  One small family business like mine is going to have little to no impact in the greater scheme of things.

This is also a mattress that I do not happen to sell a whole lot of simply because it doesn't carry a big brand name cache, and its not special enough of a product (or good enough) to merit being more expensive ala something like a Royal Pedic.  Thats more or less our challenge with this particular bed, but I do think we were successful in terms of what we have at the cost. 

The other challenge is just like anything else, the people with the knowledge and pockets deep enough to get into manufacturing really high quality goods probably don't want to get involved heavily in the retail market.  They prefer people buying indirect in a way because it simplifies everything for them.  There are a couple of exceptions I have seen like Gardner and this is probably the only reason their prices are so competitive for what you get, they sell direct.  On the other hand, even though they make a good product they don't make anything truly comparable to a lot of the really high end brands either...so there is still that gap in the market place. 

More people here are opting for cremation and scattering the remains out in the boonies somewhere:  lake, sea, woods, along a favorite hiking trail.   No coffin, and no tombstone required, in many cases.  No cemetary plot, either. 

For latexes, and other matress materials, there may be (for manufacturers of them) high fixed costs, and chemical feedstocks and energy prices usually don't go down much in price, and there are are environmental and health / safety costs to mmet USA regulations.  The chemical industry is cylical, in terms of demand and salability of the products, but often times locked-in when it comes to costs to produce a chemical, at least in the USA.   That's why much of the industry is going offshore:   lower feedstock prices, slave and low-wage labor, no enviromental restrictions, little obligation to provide a safe and healthy workplace.